Catastrophic volcanism as a cause of shocked features found at the K/T boundary and in cryptoexplosion structures

The presence of quartz grains containing shock lamellae at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary is viewed by many as the single most compelling evidence of meteoritic or cometary impact because there is no known endogenous mechanism for producing these features. Similarly the presence of shocked quartz, shatter cones, coesite and stishovite at cryptoexplosion structures is comonly taken as conclusive evidence of impact. However, several recent studies have cast doubt on this interpretation. It is argued that basaltic volcanism, although not normally explosive, can under exceptional circumstances produce overpressures sufficiently high to produce shock features. The exceptional circumstances include a high content of volatiles, usually CO2, and no preestablished pathway to the surface. Rapid cooling of the saturated basaltic magma can occur if it underlies a cooler more evolved magma in a chamber. Initial slow cooling and partial exsolution of the volatiles will cause the density of the basaltic magma to become less than that of the overlying magma, leading to overturning and mixing. Gas will escape the magma chamber along planar cracks once the pressure becomes sufficiently high. In the vicinity of the crack tip there is a smallscale deviatoric stress pattern which is thought to be sufficiently high to produce transient cracks along secondary axes in the quartz crystals, causing the planar features. The CO2-rich fluid inclusions which have been found along planar elements of quartz in basement rocks of the Vredefort Dome were likely to have been emplaced by such a process. If the mechanism described is capable of producing shocked features as above, it would require a reassessment of the origin of many cryptoexplosion structures as well as seriously weakening the case for an impact origin of the K/T event